Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies Communicative Capitalism and Left Politics

Fortified by the eforts of the FBI, the CIA, the Department ofDefense, and various foreign intelligence agencies, the Bush administration is certain it knows who did it and why. Initialy, the administration didn't feel the need to back up its certainty with proof and only reluctantly supplied evidence for its claims. It failed adequately to fund the 9 In Commission, fought over the release of documents, and resisted testifying before the commission. Bush and Cheney ultimately testifed, but in the Oval Ofice and not under oath. Any notes the commissioners made during the meeting were confiscated. Even as the administration claims to know who did it, it emphasizes that it did not know who was going to do it or when they were going to do it. It didn't have advance warning or information. Its incompetence is thereby rendered as its failure to function properly as a subject supposed to know. It didn't know, but now it does and it wil continue to know. And it doesn't matter if anyone believes it. Bush's conviction doesn't depend on pols, on what people th.irlk He acts on what he knows-in his gut, a clear pervert in the �acanian sense as chapters 3 and 4 explore.

The 9 In conspiracy theories follow a diferent circuit. Although certain, their certainty is not, like Bush's, that of the pervert who makes himself an instrument of "the big Other:' Rather, it is a psychotic certai.Jity, a certainty that something horrible happened and that the evidence for this horro_� is clearly before us, if we only know how to see it. They know that some in the administration are not victims but criminals, powerful, wicked, evil criminals able to carry out a conspiracy that took the lives of nearly three thousand Americans, sent the economy into a tailsp� and led to two wars. Countering the oficial story of passivity, here the government acts, ruthlessly. It's organized, eficient, able to execute its plans without a hitch. Those arguing that 9 I 11 was an inside job chalenge the Bush administration's eforts to reinforce its power by drawing attention to the already excessive obscene power on which the administration rests.

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It can already do whatever it wants, whenever it wants, and get away with it. It has the means, the capability, and, most of al, the will. The underlying conviction efect that this view generates, then, lies in its expression of our fundamental unfreedom-an unfreedom the awareness of which we normally repress.

One might wonder why, if the government or a subgroup within it already has this sort of power, would it go to the trouble of taking down the World Trade Center, particularly in the redoubled fashion that appears in emphases on both controlled demolition and airplanes. If the Bush administration, Cheney, or some secret cabal wanted war (and some advocates of alternative explanations point out that plans to invade Afghanistan were already in place as early as June 2001), why would they orchestrate an elaborate attack on U.S. ofice buildings rather than just go to war? If Bush and Cheney are so powerful, do they really need permission, consent, legitimation? If they wanted to attack Iraq, why didn't they just blame the Iraqis for the destruction of the World Trade Center? 'Why did they say the hijackers were Saudi and Yemeni-particularly given the close relationship between the Bush family and the House of Saudinstead of saying the hijackers were Iraqi? Why didn't they simply attack Iraq on trumped-up intelligence of an imminent nuclear threat? Given power's demonstrable excess-which is what the 9 In conspiracy theories demonstrate, what they can't repress-why would power need to display this excess? For whom is it staged?

In the psychotic discourse of 9 I 11 truth, power is staged for itself. It's the way that power is trying to produce itself as a new world order, a new ''big Other" at the site ofloss. S eptember n, in other words, was power's attempt to found a world through the massive expenditure of jouissance and the institution of the law. From the standpoint of the conspiracy theories, 9 I .11 is the founding obscenity or crime that initiates a new order. The primary , political task is dissolving this order. Yet at this point, the 9 I 11 conspiracy theories come up against the passivity underlying their fundamental fantasy-the subjects or, in their words, "sheeple;' who fail to share their certainty. And here they overlap with the oficial discourse on 9 I 11.

The problem passivity poses is twofold. First, the excess of obscene power is so overwhelming that one is rendered powerless in its presence. In the oficial discourse, this appears in the impossibility of being able to prevent another attack, in guaranteeing safety. Measures like taking of our shoes and belts and putting liquids in tiny bottles in clear plastic bags accentuate this pervasive helplessness. Anything could happen. Everything is dangerous. Cheney relied on the meme of inevitable attack, accentuating this unavoidable future whenever he could. In the psychotic discourse of ${ \mathfrak { g } } / { \mathfrak { 1 1 } }$ truth, p^assivity before power appears in the way that, if the government or a secret cabal of insiders could carry out so efectively the incredible conspiracy of ${ \mathfrak { g } } / { \mathfrak { 1 1 } } ,$ then it can do anything. We can do nothing to stop it. Its control is everywhere, an octopus with eye-covered tentacles. Second, insofar as psychotic certainty displaces belief, it comes under the pressure of its own drive. On the one hand, its knowledge persists despite disproof of certain claims. As David Ray Grifin argues, the knowledge of ${ \mathfrak { g } } / { \mathfrak { 1 1 } }$ is cumulative, not deductive. On the other, such certainty tends to demand uniformity: we can't necessarily believe those in our own movement. Thus, members of the 9 I 11 truth movement accuse one another of spreading disinformation or producing unreliable and unverifiable studies. We know government is al powerful-and if it's al powerful, how can we trust anything we know? How do I know I'm not being manipulated?

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This is where the conflict over the truth of September n comes up against the hard rock of the Real. And not surprisingly, this doesn't provide us with a way out, with a way through the radicaly incommensurable perspectives on 9 In. The gap between the oficial and unoficial accounts of events can't be filled in with a �et of facts. It's more fundamental, an indication of the larger , decline of symbolic eficiency, diminution of conditions of credibility, and change in the status of knowing and knowledge. As an event that can be signified, it's "never fuly verified precisely because . . . there is no external limit to it:'41 The oficial and unoficial accounts thus perpetually circle around a void that cannot be filed, deriving their enjoyment from the circuit of drive.

Psychotic Media?

What is the role of alternative or progressive media in this environment? My discussion of 9 / 11 truth shows that new media can be vitally and virally efective. They help build movements and communities. They provide alternative sources of knowledge and information. The counterknowledge they produce enables the emergence, and the flourishing, of epistemologically diferentiated spaces. Networked communications-particularly in their continued entanglements with the mainstream media-format the terrain of battle between competing conceptions of the Real.

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The subjects navigating these spaces cannot be understood as modernity's typically rational individuals. It's not the case that they simply evaluate the available alternatives, choosing among them on the basis of the best evidence. Far from it. Present subjects have no basis for evaluation, particularly insofar as they confront competing alternatives daily, alternatives about which some are certain, others skeptical, and few actually believe, because of the persistent undenig of belief under conditions of the decline of symbolic eficiency.

The proliferation of contents and voices, sources and alternatives, links and possibilties so vital a counter to corporate media's investments in and support of global capitalism-particularly in its neoliberal form-creates conditions amenable to the flourishing of psychotic discourses. Does it make sense to try to learn from them? Is it possible that endless confrontation with skepticism combined with an inability to repress our knowledge of power's obscene underpinnings could potentialy release people from acceptance of the status quo, from the law, from the powers that be? Or does constituent anxiety render us passive, fearful, vulnerable to the lure of the more powerful, the more authoritative? Is the left somehow doomed to a false choice between the embrace of unlimited possible truths and the singular truth of right-wing dogmatism?

Vhile I am pessimistic with regard to the potential of progressive media, seeing it as trapped within and furthering the very suppositions it attempts to combat, my wager is nonetheless for the possibility of breaking out of deadlock around 9 I u that so constrains contemporary left politics in the United States. Confronting our desire for 9 In "is a step in this direction. I don't mean that collectively some group called the American people longed for the destruction of the World Trade Center or hoped for an attack on the Pentagon. Rather, the United States produced the situation within the disintegrated spectacles of communicative capitalism. It desired shock, horror, rupture, some kind of break with the neoliberal confidence, dot-com euphoria, and consumer-oriented cultivation of unique identities characteristic of the Clinton years. Perhaps it is more accurate to say that the events, meanings, and afects linked together and captured by the term 9 I 1 were an object of intense (and productive) desire.

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The Bush administration's appropriation of ${ \mathfrak { g } } / { \mathfrak { 1 1 } }$ put this desire to work. Rather than presenting the events of September u in their complexity-with regard, say, to Europe's past decades of terrorism, the global economic and geopolitical position of the United States, the history of American foreign policy in the Middle East, the repercussions of the Soviet war in Mghanistan and covert U.S. participation in this war, the worldwide market in arms and munitions-the administration locked 9 I 11 into a simple binary: good versus evil. And for al its preoccupation with the details of the design of the World Trade Center, the training of the 9 I 11 pilots, the exercises and war games the U.S. military planned for September $\mathbf { 1 1 } ,$ the truth movement accepts and intensifes this binary. Even as it may seem to deny this desire, projecting it instead onto a malevolent government or faction therein, ${ \mathfrak { g } } / { \mathfrak { 1 1 } }$ conspiracy theories embrace it. The event is the irrational nugget holding it together, a symptom (or, in Lacanese, sinthome) invested with violence and obscenity-rockets, missiles, bombs, explosives, planes filled with passengers taken to secret locations and executed. In each case, the seduction of the opposition between good and �vii tells people who they are. It gives them a place in the world, one larger than the ever-fragile and mutable imaginary identities hawked in comtnunicative capitalism.

Without our desire for ${ \mathfrak { g } } / { \mathfrak { 1 } } ,$ the Bush administration would not have been able to mobilize support for its version of the event Even as the work of the truth movement raises doubts about the administration's account and even though support for Bush and his so-called war on terror plummeted to new depths in the last year of his administration, most continue to speak in hushed tones about ${ \mathfrak { g } } / { \mathfrak { 1 } } ,$ to sacralize $\mathbf { i t } ,$ to retain not just respect for the dead but a kind of awe before the event. Among leftists, this awe seems to condition and constrain action, making many wary of being labeled un-�erican or antipatriotic. At the same time, however, for many of us on the left, the years subsequent to the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon have been invigorating. Just as right-wing righteousness drives what is for all intents and purposes a religious war, a crusade, against Islam, so was left outrage under Bush so much more satisfying than during the cultural wars. But for all our hatred of Bush and his wars, for al the protests and petitions, for all the energy our anger provided, we remained unable or unwilling to take the next steps of imagining, organizing, and creating anothe� world.

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The eight years of the Bush administration were a diversion. Intoxicated with a sense of purpose, we could oppose war, torture, indefinite detention, warrantless wiretapping, a seemingly endless series of real crimes. These crimes need to be opposed. Yet such opposition keeps us feeling like we matter while neoliberal capitalism continues to enrich the very, very few and threaten the survival of the planet. We have an ethical sense. But we lack a coherent politics, primarily because we remain attached to our present values.

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Introduction

Particularly indicative of this tendency was the popularity among left intellectuals of Thomas Frank's What's the Matter With Kansas?

According to the Pew Research Center, in 2000 the Democratic Party had 33 percent party identification to the Republicans' 28 percent. That is, more people identified as Democrats than as Republicans. In 1999, when leaners (independents leaning one way rather than another) were included, the Democratic advantage was 48 percent to the Republicans' 40 percent. My point is not that Americans had left political views. Rather, it is that leftists overstated the Republicans' advantage as wel as the conservatism of the country. See "Democrats Gain Edge in Party Identification; released by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, released July 16, 2004. Available at http:/ /people-press.org (accessed July 28, 2008) .

For an initial elaboration of the notion of communicative capitalism, see my Publicity's Secret.

An especially compeling discussion is provided in Bauman, The Individualized Society.

5 Lenhart, Madden, Macgill, and Smith, "Teens and Social Media:

6 There are important exceptions here. One is Goodin, Reasons for Welfare.

7 See my discussion in Solidarity of Strangers.

In Publicity's Secret, I emphasize, contra this notion of the victim, the conspiracy and celebrity modes of subjectivization. The conspiracy theorist and the celebrity ofer ways for one to subjectivize one's position so as to escape the constraints of the position of the victim. We can think about these options as criticisms in advance, as the ways the dominant culture works to rein in political action by rendering it suspect, illegitimate, and banal or, conversely, the ways that political resistance gets pushed/ polarized into paranoid or pseudo-transgressive practices.

See Wendy Brown's analysis of the importance of ressentiment and woundedness in identity politics in States of Injury.

NOTES

2

1

3

4

s

9

1 0 See ConnollYi The Ethos of Pluralization.

1 1 For a compelling account of the breast-cancer awareness movement, see King, Pink Ribbons, Inc.

1 2 See his introduction t o Slavoj Ziiek Presents Mao, 17.

13 Rich, The Greatest Story Ever Sold, 167-71.

14 Ibid., 163.

:1 5 Zizek, Organs without Bodies, 184.

:te An even more compelling example appears in the following account of a company called "Spotrunner" on the blog Edge-generation: strategies for a discontinuous future. According to a post titled "Plasticity and Post-Branding Mini Case Study-Spotrunner": "On Spotrunner, you c�oose a generic ad, and rebundle it with minor personalized info-your company's name, contact address, etc. The indivisibility of ads has suddenly been vaporized. It's not just that anyone can buy them-when you buy an ad on Spotrunner, you're really buying several rebundled, microchunked goods-so it's that the ad itself has been redefined. This is a perfect example of the way in which microchunking unlocks distributed scale economies-through the reuse and recombination of microchunks. Spotrunner can be hypereficient not just because it alows access to buying distribution online, but because it microchunks ads, letting them be rebundled-and so reused-making Spotrunner a far more eficient economic solution to buying ads than anything else in its strategic group" (posted January 23, 2006). MUltiplicity and variability, the divisibility of what previously seemed indivisible, characterizes the product as well as th� strategy behind it. Available at http:/ /w.bubblegeneration.com (accessed October 28, 2oo8 ).

17 Frank, One Market under God, 305-6.

1s Zizek in Slavoj Zitek Presents Mao, 24.

:19 Moufe, The Democratic Paradox; Zizek; The Ticklish Subject; Ranciere, Disagreement; and Brown, ·�erican Nightmare:' For a persuasive development of the notion of postdemocracy, see Crouch, Post-Democracy;

20 Bauman, The Individualized Society, 106.

21 Moufe, The Democratic Paradox, 105. See also Moufe, On the Political.

22 Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, �1.

23 Ibid., 38; my emphasis.

Ranciere.'s arg-ument is further complicated by his reading of disruption as the essence of politics and of Plato as a seminal step toward depoliticization. If disruption is the essence of politics, then governance is necessarily depoliticizing. This view of governance allows for a kind of permanent contestation without any responsibilty for actual decisions and implementation. The resulting left politics is reduced to a politics of resistance. Additionally, if the problems of depoliticization start with Plato, then how does the term contribute to a diagnosis of the contemporary situation? How is it nothing but the inevitable failure of order?

25 Ranciere, Disagreement, 108.

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26 Ibid., no.

27 Zizek, The Ticklish Subject, 198-205.

2s Ibid., 209.

29 .For elaboration of this point, see my Zizek's Politics.

30 Zizek, The Ticklish Subject, 204.

3 t Ibid., 353·

32 There are of course others. Herbert Marcuse's analysis of "the unification of opposites" that occurs as political and commercial languages merge remains prescient and compelling; see One Dimensional Man (1964) . Yet insofar as his critique targets the welfare state, technocracy, and the conformity of mass culture, it cannot simply be patched and u_l?graded as an application to the current setting. For a discussion of the shift from technocracy to techno culture, see chapter 3 of Dean, Publicity's Secret.

For elaborations of a left ethos of generosity, see Connolly, The Ethos ofPluralization; Coles, Rethinking Generosity; an4 Vhite, Sustaining Afirmation. See also the debate over postfoundationalism in Hedgehog .Review 7, no. 2 (Summer 2oos).

In 2004, 55·3 percent of the voting-age population of the United States turned out for the election. "National Voter Turnout in Federal Elections: 1960-·2oo8;' http:/ /www.infoplease.com/ ipa/ Ao781453.html (accessed October 30, 2oo8 ). The census bureau reports that 64 percent of U.S. citizens eighteen years of age and older turned out. "Voting and Registration in the Election of November 2004;' March 2006, http:/ /ww.census.gov (accessed October 30, 2oo8).

ONE Technology

:1 See Dean, Publicity's Secret, and "The Networked Empire:'

2 Frank, One Market under God, 151.

3 I set out the notion of ideology in Publicity's Secret.

4 Sassen,·Losing Control?

5 Harve}'j A Brief History of Neoliberalism, 3.

6 Colin Crouch identifies similar processes in Europe (primarily Italy and the Netherlands) and Great Britain in his Post-Democracy.

7 See Eva illouz's discussion of the insertion of "communication" as a therapeutic ideal in the heart of corporate culture, in Cold Intimacies.

s Matic and Pantie, 'War ofWords:

9 My account of antagonism draws from Ernesto Ladau and Slavoj Zizek. For a more thorough elaboration, see Dean, Zizek's Politics.

10 For a discussion of the role of speed under neoliberalism, see Armitage and Roberts, "Chronotopia:

1 .1 Actually, one doesn't need to b e optimistic o r pessimistic t o emphasize abundance. Critical analysts of the Internet observe that, contrary to capitalisin's supposition that scarcity determines value, the value of the Internet is premised on abundance. Mark Poster writes, "With the Internet, as with other networked media, a counterposition is installed in which a communication has greater value the more individuals it reaches, the more it multiplies itself, the more common or universal it is;' "What's the Matter with the Internet?, 46. Poster also points out that television advertising is an exception to the idea of scarcity-a television program is more valuable (and hence ad time more expensive) the more popular it is. Contemporary public relations and advertising practices rely on intensifying and expanding brand presence. And here they reassemble other modes of functioning in the capitalist market-the establishment of ubiquity rather than scarcity (McDonald's and Coke come to mind). So rather than indicating that abundance is what makes networked communications so seemingly transformative of capitalist laws of supply and demand, Poster's point reminds us of the limits of those laws-not everything follows the logic of scarcity, ideas and practices (those connected with public health or religious faith, say) perhaps least of all. For an alternative approach to surplus, one that views scarcity as an ideological delusion, see Wark, A Hacker Manifesto.

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NOTES TO C HAPTER ONE

34

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